Catching Up With Patricia Delgado, One Year After Her Departure From Miami City Ballet

Patricia Delgado. Photo by Gio Alma, Courtesy Delgado.

Patricia Delgado surprised her many fans last March when she announced that she'd be leaving Miami City Ballet after nearly 20 years to move to New York to be closer to her boyfriend, New York City Ballet soloist and resident choreographer Justin Peck. Though she took a risk stepping into the unknown without a sense of where her career would take her, it's paid off: this year we've seen Delgado pop up everywhere from Christopher Wheeldon's concert production of Brigadoonat New York City Center to dancing alongside Peck in a music video for the indie rock band The National.

Now, Delgado is embarking on a new challenge: modern dance. On March 7 Delgado will perform at The Kennedy Center as part of Damian Woetzel's DEMO series in two works by postmodern choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Delgado and Tanowitz first joined forces last summer at the Vail Dance Festival, where, as a complete surprise to Delgado, Tanowitz created a new work, Solo for Patti, on her in just five days. Delgado describes that time as a kind of modern dance bootcamp. "Even though I was in my pointe shoes, we were playing with taking away a lot of my ballerina-isms," she says. "Pam is very interested in clarity and shapes and not using emotion, but having a blank slate of a facial expression, which is so counterintuitive to me." Though Delgado could have let frustration and self doubt get in her way, she decided to embrace Tanowitz's vision completely; when they both returned to New York after the festival, their collaboration continued.

Delgado (second from left) with Tanowitz and musicians at the Vail Dance Festival last summer. Photo Courtesy Delgado.

Next week's performance will show the fruits of those efforts; Delgado will reprise Solo for Patti and will dance in the world premiere of a trio titled Blueprint alongside two male dancers from Tanowitz's company. "The new piece is much more modern," says Delgado, noting that she initially "felt like a fish out of water." To prepare, she's been taking Cunningham classes. "They're really hard and I have to completely leave judgement at the door and be really open to feeling out of my comfort zone, but I try to just go in there curious." Although Delgado performed contemporary works by choreographers like Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp at MCB, she explains that she was dancing them as a ballerina. "There's only so much ballet technique you can let go of when Paul Taylor's Mercuric Tidings is on the same program as Theme and Variations," she says. With Tanowitz, she's trying hard to dive in fully. "I don't want to look like the ballerina in the trio."

In addition to adding modern dance to her resumé, Delgado has also stepped into the position of repetiteur: She set Peck's In Creases on Boston Ballet for their spring season, opening March 9. "I was so nervous, more nervous to do this than any performance I'd ever done," she says. But she overcame her fear, and came to love the process. "I think it helped that I can still put myself in the shoes of a dancer," she says. For example, she made it a goal to work with as many casts as possible, and gave each group an equal chance to try things out in rehearsal. She left after two weeks feeling very proud of the outcome. "I love what the lightning, visceral impetus of Justin's ballets did for me as a dancer, and I wanted as many people as possible to feel that."

This may be Delgado's first experience as a repetiteur, but it certainly won't be the last. In May she'll head to the Dresden Semperoper Ballet to set Peck's Heatscape with her sister, MCB principal Jeanette Delgado,and she may have the chance to set In Creases again at Vail this summer. She'll also spend a few weeks in April as a guest ballet master at Cincinnati Ballet and is piecing together summer festival plans at the Nantucket Atheneum Dance Festival and Isabella Boylston's Ballet Sun Valley.

Despite her busy year, she admits leaving the company that she called home for nearly half of her life has been anything but easy. "I'm going to cry as I tell you this," she says over the phone. "Specifically what I miss is company class and watching my peers dance all day. Not having that camaraderie daily is really tough." Yet the highlight of the past year has been the excitement of the unknown. "Every day is a mystery," she says. "Sometimes I don't know where I'm going to take class, who's going to teach, if there'll be a free studio, what email I'm going to get about a potential opportunity...but every day I'm like, 'Wow, I'm free to do whatever I want!'"

What's going on in ballet this week? We've pulled together some highlights.

The Bolshoi Premiere of John Neumeier's Anna Karenina

Last July Hamburg Ballet presented the world premiere of John Neumeier's Anna Karenina, a modern adaptation on Leo Tolstoy's famous novel. Hamburg Ballet coproduced the full-length ballet with the National Ballet of Canada and the Bolshoi, the latter of which will premiere the work March 23 (NBoC will have its premiere in November). The production will feature Bolshoi star Svetlana Zakharova in the title role. This is especially fitting as Neumeier's initial inspiration for the ballet came from Zakharova while they were working together on his Lady of the Camellias. The following video delves into what makes this production stand out.

In one of 60 spacious dance studios at the Beijing Dance Academy, Pei Yu Meng practices a tricky step from Jorma Elo's Over Glow. She's standing among other students, but they all work alone, with the help of teachers calling out corrections from the front of the room. On top of her strong classical foundation and clean balletic lines, Pei Yu's slithery coordination and laser-sharp focus give her dancing a polished gleam. Once she's mastered the pirouette she's been struggling with, she repeats the step over and over until the clock reaches 12 pm for lunch. Here, every moment is a chance to approach perfection.

Pei Yu came to the school at age 10 from Hebei, a province near Beijing. Now 20, and in her third year of BDA's professional program, she is an example of a new kind of Chinese ballet student. Founded in 1954 by the country's communist government, BDA is a fully state-funded professional training school with close to 3,000 students and 275 full-time teachers over four departments (ballet, classical Chinese dance, social dance and musical theater). It offers degrees in performance, choreography and more. BDA's ballet program has long been known for fostering pristine Russian-style talent. But since 2011, the school has made major efforts to broaden ballet students' knowledge of Chinese dance traditions and the works of Western contemporary ballet choreographers. Pointe went inside this prestigious academy to see how BDA trains its dancers.

Dutch National Ballet Soloist Michaela DePrince has been busy winning over the mainstream media. Since last spring, the First Position star not only landed a spokesmodel deal with Jockey, but she also recently teamed up on a commercial with Chase Bankand just announced that Madonna will be directing her upcoming biopic,Taking Flight (totally casual).

What could possibly be next? The cover of April's Harper's Bazaar Netherlands, it turns out. Posing in an arabesque with her hair slicked back in her usual ballet bun, DePrince traded in her leotard and tights for a stunning metallic Gucci dress (can we do that, too?).

Dancing with The Royal Ballet from 1992 until 2013, former principal Leanne Benjamin tackled just about every role in the classical gamut, from Juliet to Nikiya to Giselle. As the young and spirited Swanilda in this clip from Coppélia, Benjamin reveals that she has equal talent for the silly as the serious. Her comedic performance in Swanilda's doll dance is this role at its best.

In an effort to trick the scheming Dr. Coppelius and save her beloved Franz, Swanilda pretends she is the doll Coppélia come to life. As she begins to dance, Benjamin is stiff and mechanical one moment and then flopped over like a rag doll the next. Dr. Coppelius, played by character artist Luke Heydon, watches her enthralled and Benjamin's gaze is fixed in a plastic stare. But when the toymaker looks away, Benjamin's Swanilda breaks doll character and frantically tries to figure out an escape. Feebly, Dr. Coppelius tries to keep up with her. Although we feel some sympathy for the delusional old toymaker, we can't help laughing at Swanilda's antics. And that slap at 1:55? Gets us every time. Happy #ThrowbackThursday!

Deep in the basement of Lincoln Center's David H. Koch Theater is a small, windowless space that's home to nearly 6,000 pairs of pointe shoes, neatly stacked on shelves that reach to the ceiling. It's New York City Ballet's shoe room, and for company members, it's one of the most important places in the world. Dancers frequently stop by to search for the ideal pair for a special performance, or to tweak their custom pointe shoe orders, trying to get that elusive perfect fit. "If the shoe isn't right, the dancer can't do her job," says shoe room supervisor and former Pacific Northwest Ballet principal Linnette Roe. We talked to Roe and NYCB soloist Emilie Gerrity about some of the most interesting—and surprising—secrets of the shoe room.

The NYCB dancers go through 9,000 to 11,000 pairs of shoes each year, including flat shoes, sneakers, jazz shoes, and character shoes. The company has an annual shoe budget of about $780,000.

Younji-Grace Choi at the 2014 USA IBC. Choi is now a dancer with Cincinnati Ballet and will return to the USA IBC as a senior competitor this summer. Photo by Richard Finkelstein, Courtesy USA IBC.

Exciting news today: the USA International Ballet Competition has just announced its list of invited competitors for the summer 2018 competition. TheUSA IBC has invited 119 dancers from 19 countries out of over 300 applicants to compete in Jackson, MS June 10-23.

Since the last USA IBC in 2014 the competition has expanded its age limits; the junior category now allows dancers ages 14-18 and the senior category dancers ages 19-28. Of the 119 competitors this year, 53 are juniors and 66 are seniors. The United States has the highest number of competitors invited (52), followed by Japan (23) and South Korea (14). The other countries represented are Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Mexico, Mongolia, Peru, Philippines, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

The latest front in the controversy over the underrepresentation of female choreographers in ballet is at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. They're facing a petition and choreographer resignation that forced them to rebrand a season and publicly defend their programming.

On February 26, artistic director Ivan Cavallari, who started the job in the summer of 2017, announced the 2018-2019 season, which included a program titled Femmes. The program announcement said the evening would have "woman as its theme," and that Cavallari had "chosen three distinctive voices, rising stars of choreography, to undertake this great subject."

The three voices Cavallari chose to create on the theme of women, however, were all men.

"This was just too much for me, it was the last straw," says Kathleen Rea, a former member of National Ballet of Canada who now freelances, choreographs and teaches in Toronto. Rea says she's been bothered by the dearth of women choreographers throughout her career. But referring to women as "subjects" and excluding them from choreographing on a program about them compelled her to take action.